Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Warning - Check If Your Content Has Been Stolen . . .

and your copyright violated.  Kathryn Doyle over at the California Genealogical Society and Blog gave me a heads up about my recent content being "lifted" posted at what I consider a "splog" or spam blog.

Here are is a link to the offending website and all genea-bloggers might want to check to see if their content is being stolen or their copyright is being violated:


Here are the details on the blog owner:

Name: Dragan Mizeric
E-mail: draganmizeric@gmail.com

What can you do in these situations?  Well I relied upon a fantastic post over at Lorelle on WordPress entitled "What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content" which outlines what you can do about copyright violations.  I also reviewed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - Blogger information.

I sent the following e-mail to the blog owner:

Dear Mr. Mizeric:

This is to advise you that you are using copyrighted and protected material on your website/blog. Your illegal use of various articles including "Magazines Now Included With Google Book Search" at
http://genealogy-expert.blogspot.com/2008/12/magazines-now-included-with-google-book.html is originally from my website/blog called "Magazines Now Included With Google Book Search" at http://destinationaustinfamily.blogspot.com/2008/12/magazines-now-included-with-google-book.html. This is original content and I am the author and copyright holder. Use of copyright protected material without permission is illegal under copyright laws.

Please take one or more of the following actions immediately:

• Provide compensation for use of my copyright protected material of $50.00 USD for each article paid via PayPal.
• Remove the plagiarized material immediately.

I expect a response within 5 days to this issue. Thank you for your immediate action on this matter.

In addition, I will be sending this report to Google via mail/fax per Google regulations to report the copyright violations. See
http://www.google.com/blogger_dmca.html.

In addition, I have reported the Genealogy-Expert blog as a splog using this link since the blog owner has hidden or eliminated the "flag this blog" option on the blog.

5 comments:

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

If you have used the word "genealogy" on a recent post he has it. Hopefully blogger will shut him down quickly! Thanks for the heads up.

Elizabeth O'Neal said...

Judging from his profile, apparently the guy is an expert in everything, from climbing to genealogy to guns. And I'm betting that's not really him in the profile photo. Unless he's also a fencing expert.

Jennifer said...

Poo on him! Poo on sploggers! They spoil my spinterwebs!

I'll totally kick his butt if I run into him in a dark alley somewhere in the tubes.

Elyse said...

Thanks for the warning. I am so annoyed that he put my content up on there.

Is there anything you can do about this? I saw one of my articles on there and it really worries me.

I am curious to know if he has responded to your email. I very much doubt it. What a jerk.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the heads up! This is good information to know.

I had a couple of my articles used without permission by someone at a well known website. It took multiple emails but eventually my articles were taken down.